Excellence in Communication Certificate Sign Ups

You’ve heard me talk about the Excellence in Communication Certificate (ECC) a couple of times now in class.  As the semester ends, we’re encouraging interested RCL students to sign up for the program now.  If you’re a Paterno Fellow Aspirant, or if you plan on having a major or minor in the College of the Liberal Arts I strongly encourage you to sign up.

You’re more than welcome to put me down as your preference for ECC adviser–I’d love to stay connected with you for the rest of your time at Penn State!  But if you feel like you’d rather get some feedback from someone else, I completely understand.  (And I won’t be checking up on who is assigned to other advisers, so no need to worry about any awkwardness should you choose to go elsewhere.)

So what does “signing up” mean?  Essentially, it simply means you’ll be assigned an adviser to walk you through the process, and will receive occasional emails updating you on changes to the program.  You’ll also have the opportunity to meet with your ECC adviser to discuss your work at any point until submission.  (Submission is usually second semester junior year or first semester senior year.)  Other than access to an adviser, the benefit of registering now is that you’ll stay updated on the program, which can help keep it on your radar.

So I encourage you to read more about the ECC program, or to sign up at the link below:

Sign up here!

Portfolios and resumes

I’ve enjoyed reading through your portfolios over the last few days.  I do want to suggest, though, that you think carefully about what should be included on a publicly posted resume.  Specifically, I’m thinking about personal contact information.  Depending on the format, it’s entirely possible that web bots will crawl the resume; if your phone number is listed, you might have just accidentally signed yourself up for spam texts.  It’s not terribly likely, but it does happen.  More troubling: name, address, and phone number can sometimes be used to begin a full scale identity theft effort.  And if anyone contacts you about a job or internship after just seeing your resume on your portfolio, assume it’s a scam.

Most significantly, though: while you’ll probably be in a different room next year, consider from a personal safety perspective whether you want to let everyone who stumbles across your site know where you live.  (This goes for both girls and guys.)

The convention for online resumes is to only provide name and, possibly, email.  (Keep in mind that even this can be scanned, resulting in spam email, scams, or identity theft.)  If you do want to remain “contactable,” using a contact form within the site may be a better option; you can shut the form down if you start getting ridiculous spam, but you can’t easily shut down your email account.

I’ll be back with a few other closing thoughts in the next couple days, but wanted to get a quick post out for you.

Calculating your grade thus far

I wrote this post last semester about how to calculate your grade manually, and the same sort of method–breaking things into 5% chunks–works well with the assignments this semester, too.

If you’d like to see/try out the quick-and-dirty spreadsheet I’m using, feel free to take a look.  Some explanation: you’ll need to enter letter grades on the left side, and find your score all the way to the right.  Note that you’ll need to guesstimate ALL your remaining scores for this to work.  Also, note that grades need to be entered exactly as referenced in C39 to C56.  So “C/C+” is correct, but “C+/C” is not, and “B” is correct, but “B ” is not (extra space).

Let me know if you have any questions.

(Shout-out to my friend Josh who helped identify/fix my noob error stemming from Excel’s use of floating point arithmetic.  ROUND () to the rescue!)

 

Why conservatives and liberals talk past each other

So it’s probably become clear by this point that I’m a junkie for The Atlantic.  Today’s really awesome post is by guest author Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at the NYU-Stern School of Business.  It explores the ramifications of Haidt’s research into how people make value judgments.  People, regardless of nationality, base much of their decisions upon the importance they place in values in these areas:

  • Care/Harm
  • Fairness/Cheating
  • Liberty/Oppression
  • Loyalty/Betrayal
  • Authority/Subversion
  • Sanctity/Degradation

It turns out that liberals tend to take the view that unless you harm, cheat, or oppress someone, you should be able to do anything you want (i.e., the first three, which are all grounded in individual rights).  Conservatives likewise see value in these three, but also hold that the traditional social/collective means of regulating societies should matter (i.e., loyalty, respect for authority/tradition, and maintaining the sanctity/”holiness” of things like flags, symbols, places, religion, etc.)

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You’ll note that the phrasing of the first three are almost identical to the values we identified in our deliberation discussion: safety, fairness, and freedom.  Where Haidt’s article really shines, though, is the way in which he explains how conservatives and liberals view/frame even these three things values in different ways.  We don’t at all mean the same thing when we talk about fairness, for instance.  Definitely worth a read.

By the way, those of you arguing in your papers that we need to replace race-based affirmative action with income-based affirmative action REALLY should read the second-to-last paragraph (and probably the whole piece).

Debate tonight! (Friday March 15)

I just got the notice for this today, but thought it was interesting enough to pass along:

The Penn State and Pittsburgh debate teams are have a debate on a question of conjecture to explore: if we could, should we cure death?

I think this will be fascinating, and while we’ve given debate a hard time in class this semester for its effect on civil discourse, this could prove both instructive and entertaining.

7pm tonight (March 15) in 104 Thomas.

Public Policy Institutes (Think Tanks)

When considering possible policy recommendations for the upcoming persuasive essay, it might be beneficial to consult those who’ve thought carefully about the issue at hand.  Here’s a list of domestic public policy institutes from Wikipedia.  And here’s a list (slightly outdated) of the 25 most cited think tanks in the media, along with a one word label of their political leaning.

Rubrics and how to read them (and why I don’t like them)

Before looking at the rubrics below, I strongly encourage you to reread the directions for the deliberation unit, under the Assignments link above.  (A good portion of the questions I’ve been asked in class are already addressed in the instructions.)

Since rubrics are, themselves, rhetorical, I thought it might prove useful to consider what they seem to be conveying:

Continue reading

Debate vs Deliberation

We’ve been focusing on deliberation for the past several weeks, because it has unique potential to improve the quality civic life.  Sometimes, though, debate is a necessary approach.  If you’re interested in seeing the contrast between the two, the Penn State Debate Society is holding an open debate this Wedensday, February 20 at 6pm in 112 Borland.

The issue for debate is whether the United States should use military drones for strikes in countries with which it is not at war.  (Essentially, is it ok for the US to kill people in places like Pakistan?)

You can go to watch or go to participate; either way, it should prove educational not only about the issue being discussed, but about the strengths and limits of the debate model for discourse.